Now you can see the Skirt Full of Stars in action!

In case you haven’t seen my last post about it, this is a hand-sewn tulle wrap skirt with integrated fiber optics and lights that change color in response to the speed and direction of the wearer’s movement.

It uses the Lilypad Arduino platform, developed for integrating electronics into textiles. There’s a purple organza underlayer to the skirt onto which is sewn the Lilypad main circuit board and a power supply, and an accelerometer hangs from a ribbon to allow for freedom of movement. The Lilypad receives the measurements of the accelerometer’s movement, and translates them into color output for the tricolor LEDs around the waistband of the skirt.

I used sparkle fiber optic cable to cut the harsh quality that you can get when using LEDs and distribute the light more evenly throughout the skirt. In previous prototypes I had simply created a line of LEDs swirling around the skirt, and this makes for a far more subtle and wearable effect.

I have to say, getting decent video of this skirt was quite a challenge! Too much light and the fiber optics didn’t show up on camera, too little and nothing showed up at all. Even this isn’t an accurate representation of what it looks like in person – the camera mostly just picks up the points of light from fiber optics pointed directly at it, where in person you can see them all around the skirt. But hopefully it at least gives a decent idea of how the whole thing works…

Want your own?

It looks like I’ll be making another of these soon, so I plan to take more photos of the construction process and post the instructions here as I go.

If you’re not feeling the yearning to jump into making wearable electronics yourself but you still want your own, send me an email at shannon@polymathdesignlab.com. I had a lot of fun creating this and would be thrilled to make some as custom projects.

I heard today that Techshop Portland has now received their laser cutter – woo-hoo! It’ll probably be another week or two before they have the first SBU (Safety and Basic Use) class, which I’ll need to take to get access to it… but it’s in sight, and that has me very excited.

One of the reasons I’m so excited: pictured here, a tower of acrylic bracelets that are part of some really special jewelry sets I’ll be unveiling very soon. They just got here today, after being shipped out by Ponoko more than three weeks ago. It’s not Ponoko’s fault at all – my shipment was held up in US customs. Not really sure what was so threatening about a handful of sheets of plastic cut into little pieces, but apparently it warranted a thorough inspection (in which they also managed to remove and/or lose a handful of those pieces.)

I love Ponoko… they’re a great company, they provide an awesomely personalized level of service, and without them I wouldn’t be doing or making what I am right now. Even once I have access to the Techshop laser cutter, I know that I’ll still use them for some services (like metal cutting).  However, all that said, it’s going to be incredibly nice to be able to shorten my turn around time and my design/revise cycle so drastically, not to have to worry about things like shipments getting held up at the border, and to be able to bring in all sorts of other materials that I wasn’t able to source with Ponoko – like recycled materials!

It’s going to be another couple of days before the items from today’s arrival hit the shop – I have to polish and assemble and photograph and the like. But before I do that, I’m off to work on the project that I already had slated for this evening. It’s time for some LEDs to be introduced to some fabric!

Lilypad Arduino prototype circuit from Shannon Henry on Vimeo.

(for more about what you are watching, see:  A working prototype!)

How exciting! Pictured here is a functioning prototype for the motion sensing skirt that I’ve been planning. It uses a Lilypad Arduino, a microcontroller board designed specifically for use in textile electronics. The lilypad board takes readings from an accelerometer (the small board in the upper right of the photo) and translates information about the movement it is sensing into different colors of light from the RGB LEDs at the bottom.

Ok, so I know this doesn’t translate all that well to a still photo. I tried to take a video of it working, but my little point and shoot doesn’t handle the LED very well for videos – they made streaks all over the screen. I’ll see if I can get over to my parents’ house tomorrow and talk my little sister into playing videographer for me, though. In the meantime, I’m off to work more on the final design.

This week I received my first order back from Ponoko. If you are interested in making things and you haven’t heard of them, you should really check them out – it’s a company based in New Zealand that allows you to upload either a vector graphic file or a photo of something you’ve designed and have it laser-cut and etched into any one of a number of possible materials.

I was prototyping a number of jewelry items and keychains, as well as some other things, largely to test out the service and see if it will work as well for Polymath Design Lab as I think it will. I created one file to be cut in wood (beech plywood) and one to be cut in acrylic. Just about everything I tried in wood worked beautifully. The acrylic was a bit more hit and miss, but I still ended up with some great pieces, and definitely learned about what I did and didn’t like on it, which was the primary goal.

One of my favorite things about the company was the transparency of their process. They update you on every step of the way – going so far as to provide an RSS feed you can subscribe to updating you on the status of your project. I also have checked out their forums and noticed that they are quick to help anyone who has a question or is running into difficulties with the process.

I’m already working on my next order from them, which will include more copies (some with slight tweaks) of a number of the designs I had created in the wood, and a test run with bamboo, a new material they just added to their catalog within the last week or so. You can expect to see some of the wood items from my second order (and possibly some of the bamboo as well, depending on how it turns out), up in my etsy shop in a few weeks.